Privacy
Privacy policy
Pareto sells nothing, tracks no one and collects only what you write to us. This page sets out which of your information we hold, why, who it is entrusted to and how to exercise your rights.
- Last updated
- 5 September 2026
- In effect since
- 5 September 2026
Pareto is a non-profit organization incorporated in Quebec. This policy covers the pareto.eco site, its decision-support tools and the donation form it hosts. It is written to the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, as amended by Law 25.
1What we collect, and why
We collect only what serves the purposes set out below. This site has no account to create, no newsletter and no sign-up of any kind.
| By what means | Information collected | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Contact form | Name, email address, chosen subject, message content | Answering your request and following up on it |
| Donation form | Name, email address, amount and date of the gift | Acknowledging the gift and keeping the organization's books |
| Browsing the site | IP address, browser type, pages requested, recorded in the host's logs | Serving pages, diagnosing outages, turning away abuse |
The site loads no audience measurement tool, no advertising pixel and no tracker. We do no profiling and make no decision about you based on automated processing.
The decision-support tools send nothing back. The settings you make in them, the sliders of the vehicle comparison for instance, live in the page address. They are neither sent nor stored: they leave your browser only if you copy the link yourself.
2Cookies and tracking technologies
The site sets two cookies, and only if you press the language selector in the header: pareto_fr and pareto_en. They carry the value 1 and nothing else, last a year, are set as SameSite=Lax, and serve one purpose only: so that the pareto.eco address later returns the language you chose.
These are cookies necessary to the operation of the site. We set no others: no audience measurement, no personalization, no profiling. That is why you see no consent banner, which Law 25 reserves for non-essential cookies. To erase them, clear the site data in your browser; switching language replaces one with the other.
3Sharing and communication outside Quebec
We neither sell nor rent your personal information, and we disclose it to no one for marketing purposes. Four service providers see part of it, each strictly within its mandate:
- Netlify (United States): hosting of the site and processing of the contact form. The messages you send us are stored there before we read them.
- Zeffy (Montreal, Quebec): the donation form, on the Support page and on that page alone. Pareto receives your name, your email address and the amount. Your card details are processed by Zeffy and its payment provider: they never pass through pareto.eco and we do not keep them.
- Google (United States): the site's typefaces are served by Google Fonts, which passes your IP address to Google on every page load.
- Esri (United States): the base map of the Study programs tool is served by Esri, which passes your IP address when you open that map.
Two points of detail. The mapping library itself is served by pareto.eco rather than by a third-party delivery network: opening a map exposes you to the base map and to nothing else.
And the button that reads the average gasoline price, in the vehicle comparison, has your browser fetch a public file from the Régie essence Québec, in Quebec. Nothing about you is sent there beyond what any request reveals, your IP address.
Three of these providers are outside Quebec. Before any communication of personal information outside Quebec, Law 25 requires us to assess whether that information will receive adequate protection there: we weigh its sensitivity, the purpose pursued, the provider's protection measures and the legal regime of the country it operates in. That assessment is redone whenever we change provider.
4Retention and security
- Messages received through the contact form: kept for as long as it takes to answer and follow up on the correspondence, three years at most.
- Records relating to donations: kept for six years after the end of the fiscal year they relate to, as tax rules require.
- The host's technical logs: kept according to Netlify's own policy. We consult them only in the event of an incident.
Once that term is reached, the information is securely destroyed or anonymized.
The site is served over HTTPS without exception, and access to the messages we receive is restricted to those at Pareto who have to handle them. In the event of a confidentiality incident presenting a risk of serious injury, we notify the people concerned and the Commission d'accès à l'information, and we keep the register the law requires.
5Your rights
Quebec legislation grants you the following rights:
- Access: to know whether we hold information about you, and to obtain a copy of it.
- Correction: to have information that is inaccurate, incomplete or equivocal corrected.
- Withdrawal of consent: to take back at any time an agreement you had given us.
- Portability: to receive the information you provided to us in a structured, commonly used technological format.
- Ceasing dissemination and de-indexing: to have the dissemination of information stopped, or the link leading to it removed, where that dissemination causes you serious injury.
To exercise one of these rights, write to the person responsible below. We answer within 30 days of receiving the request, and the answer is free: should any fee apply to transcription or transmission, we would tell you first. We may ask you to confirm your identity before acting, so as not to hand your information to someone else.
6Person in charge of the protection of personal information
Under Law 25, this responsibility falls to the person exercising the highest authority within the organization, unless they delegate it in writing. For any question, request or complaint regarding your personal information:
- Title
- Person in charge of the protection of personal information
- Organization
- Pareto, a non-profit organization incorporated in Quebec
- info@pareto.eco
- Otherwise
- Through the contact form
If our answer does not satisfy you, you may file a complaint with the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, which can examine a disagreement over access or correction.
7Changes to this policy
Should we amend this policy, we will publish the revised version at this address, with its date, and flag any substantial change prominently on the site.